Maitland McDonagh

Peppermint is a bloody crowd-pleaser, but it’s fundamentally forgettable, the kind of movie whose details begin to disappear the moment the credits roll.

The bottom line is that Reprisal is an extremely silly movie doing its damnedest to look tough and gritty and clever, none of which it is. In fact, it’s both tediously formulaic and weirdly puzzling.

If it were half an hour shorter, China Salesman (released overseas as Deadly Contract, the epitome of generic titling) might be a candidate for “so bad it’s good (or at least kind of fun)” status. But it’s not.

This stage-bound farce could easily be an American sitcom: It's all slamming doors, eavesdropping and stupid miscommunications, garnished with a heavy-handed helping of comedy of humiliation.

No cliché is unturned, no "dog duty" pun avoided (get it -- dog doody), no creepy gay-panic subtext unplumbed in this family comedy.

The cloying odor of therapy hangs over this preachy holiday fable about a boy whose neglectful dad dies and comes back as a snowman.

The best thing about it is the cast. Baldwin's moronic Barney is an acquired taste, but Krakowski is an adorable, sassy Betty, and Johnston brings an endearing coltishness to the sensible Wilma.

Frankly, the film's nostalgia for the "coffee, tea or me?" era of flying, when stewardesses were fantasy figures in soaring heels and uniforms tailored for bust enhancement rather than utility, is retro in all the wrong ways.

It's all mean-spirited, foulmouthed sniping.

The hyperactive Hong Kong action stuff is getting old.

This vapid, mean-spirited comedy is Lopez's show, and though she is utterly unconvincing as a paragon of down-to-earth virtues, the last laugh was hers from the outset.

Hippolyte subsequently reinvented himself first as a director of baroque erotic thrillers and then as music-video maestro to pop tarts like Britney Spears, but stalk-and-slash horror -- for all its porn-movie rhythms -- appears to have defeated him.

A morose, slow-moving action picture.

The less you demand of this bloody, by-the-numbers sequel, the more you'll enjoy it.

The script, by co-writers and -directors Douglas McGrath and Peter Askin, is intermittently clever, but their direction is leaden and assassinates every gag with a lethal accuracy the CIA could only hope to achieve.

The film seems longer than its 93-minute running time, but kids will probably enjoy its potty humor, many scenes of 4-year-olds getting the better of harried adults and the inevitable moment when a cute little girl kicks the fat guy in the nads.

There's some fun to be had in seeing two of TV's resident sweetie pies, Campbell and ER's Noah Wyle, play unrepentant sons of bitches, but it's not enough.

Painfully unfunny and misguided to boot.

Bloated and incoherent.

Hopelessly muddled film cries out for the firm hand of a dyed-in-the-wool cynic like Billy Wilder, who would have put some teeth in its jabs at amoral politicians and blindly ambitious journalists.

Not clever. Not scary. Not funny.

A painfully self-conscious comedy that mistakes relentless self-referentiality for cleverness, this half-witted misfire is filled with accelerated motion, repeated and overlapping scenes, direct address to the camera and other cliches of defamiliarization.

Buono is truly charming, and the film delivers a handful of genuine laughs -- low laughs, but laughs nonetheless; if only they weren't so few and far between.

The sad thing is that Arnett, Shepard and McBride quickly establish a loose, easy camaraderie that's a real pleasure to watch. The shame is that they're working with such unrewarding material.

A stale rehash of Woody Allen-style "he's a neurotic Jew, she's a flaky shiksa" gags.

Ritchie wraps this folderol in cinematic razzle-dazzle, including animated sequences, reverse motion, trompe l'oeil production design and tricky lighting. But it's still claptrap.

Played for Maverick-like comedy, the film might have coasted on Harris and Mortensen's dialogue. But played straight it's both dull and preposterous.

That the 27-year-old Usher isn't much of an actor is no surprise, but he's strikingly uncharismatic for someone who's been in the spotlight since he was six.

The story vacillates between broad, kid-friendly gags and a series of oddly sour riffs on the theme of adult sibling rivalry.

Obvious and, frankly, 25 years too late.

If you can't spell "bogeyman," you shouldn't make movies about him.

This trashy, overwrought thriller gets itself worked up into a fine, sleazy lather that recalls the matricidal glories "Die! Die! My Darling!" and "You'll Like My Mother", then wimps out at the end.

The trouble is that Turturro's reach considerably exceeds his grasp.

The profoundly unconvincing CGI work only makes the sorry screenplay and lackluster performances look worse.

It's familiar stuff if you've sampled the vast body of work devoted to LA-dammerung.

Though Verow attended the American Film Institute and has made more than a dozen shorts and features since 1994, his low-budget gay-themed films are characterized by phenomenal indifference to framing, sound quality and performance. If his relentless amateurishness is deliberate, it's self-defeating; if not, it's inexplicable: Most people who do anything for more than a decade get better at it.

The final irony is that it's tailored for a PG-13 audience: The violence is bloodless, the sex is all come-on and the surreally reckless stunts cater to viewers too young to drive.

This live-action cartoon tries to walk the line between pleasing the faithful and appealing to a broad-based action audience. It fails on both fronts: It's too lifeless and watered-down to stand on its own high heels, but commits the cardinal sin of messing with the original.

Vonnegut's brand of juvenile surrealism...doesn't age especially well...but it could hardly be worse served than to be brought to the screen with such ham-fisted literal-mindedness.

The film's major draws are R-rated gore and some nice physical effects, proof that a man in a top-of-the-line monster suit can still be more effective than CGI.

So consistently, outrageously wrongheaded in every way it's hard to know where to start.

Despite its provocative premise, this throwback to deliberately paced, low-tech chillers of the pre-CGI era is a dreary slog through haunted-child movie cliches -- portentous dreams, glassy-eyed stares, cryptic pronouncements.

If it weren't all so cluelessly sleazy it might be funny.

Unfortunately, the mystery isn't mysterious and the characters are caricatures; the wintery New England landscape is the most striking thing about the film, but it's not interesting enough to justify watching it for 100 minutes.

Lazy, superficially au courant and utterly forgettable.

When a performer as sharp as Cedric the Entertainer is reduced to funny fat-guy shtick, you know you're in the presence of grinding mediocrity.

It's all terribly schematic, thematically obvious and not in the least bit funny.

Earnest but unenlightening drama.

For all the sex and slicing, the most shocking thing about it is how dreary it is.

Production values are low -- though, mercifully, the sound recording is clear -- and overall the project smacks of juvenile hijinks.

The best you can say is that it's all pretty harmless and pretty stupid.

Preposterous plotting and interchangeable young actors.

Even by the debased standards of preachy sports movies aimed at kids, this is pabulum.

Ironically, Faris' Samantha is the most convincing personality in the mix: She's a grotesque caricature of Courtney Love by way of Nancy Spungen, a vulgar, selfish monster of unbridled id, but you always know where she's coming from.

Puerile, gross and pandering to the lowest impulses of teenage boys.

Though once capable of writing distinct characters, Toback now populates his pictures with one-dimensional conceits who all talk like undereducated hustlers, from college professors to bottom feeders and international lions of business.

Is there anything so painful as a comedy whose every gag falls flat and then lies there, flopping like a dying flounder?

Rob Reiner's feel-good tear-jerker, in which dying well is the best revenge, wants to be heartwarming. But first-timer Justin Zackham's screenplay is so stridently formulaic and disingenuous that the film falls flat at every inspirational turn.

This coarse, nearly incoherent action picture apparently aspires to a 'Pulp Fiction"-like mixture of brutality and self-referential insouciance.

The loose, rambling conversations that substitute for action might be more interesting if any of the characters were capable of real introspection. But they're so shallow and distracted they can't even manage sustained navel-gazing, which makes their so-called relationships profoundly uninteresting.

Marvel-man Mark Steven Johnson, who wrote and directed "Daredevil" (2003) and scripted "Elektra" (2005), continues to demonstrate the wrong way to make comic book movies: Make sure special effects overwhelm the characters, let campy mannerisms go unchecked and be sure dialogue is declaimed rather than spoken.

As bad as the title, and much longer.

A leaden, tone-deaf remake of the 1955 Ealing comedy starring Alec Guinness, the Coen brothers' painfully unfunny rehash hinges on the duel of wits between five larcenous oddballs and one sweet but strong-willed old lady.

The first fruit of wunderkinder Alicia Silverstone's First Kiss Productions, this muddled thriller-cum-romantic comedy of errors suggests that she might want to lay off the producing for a few years.

The film's Montana vistas are breathtakingly beautiful, and the crisis-in-the-hot-zone sequences are as spooky as those in Outbreak, but Seagal's monologues about the environment, biological warfare, Native American spirituality and natural medicine are excruciating.

A ludicrous mishmash undermined by ghastly performances and a hopelessly convoluted screenplay.

It's a one-gag film that rises or falls on how funny you find the sight of fat, grease-slicked Jack Black crammed into spandex pants and capering like an epileptic lamb.

So shallow and brainless it's in perpetual danger of drying up and blowing away.

Lame, derivative comedy.

It goes without saying that the humor is vulgar and juvenile.

Why would anyone who wanted his or her film to be taken seriously saddle it with a cutesy title like this?

This sour coming of age story is a testament to his self-centeredness and dogged perseverance.

The script's vague, silly "explanation" for Linda's experiences -- nature abhors a spiritual vacuum, so weird stuff happens to the faithless -- is the icing on the irritation cake.

The film is preposterous on so many counts that it's hard to enumerate them.

Thinly conceived and thoroughly shallow.

The whole film is plagued by a sense of false, desperate cheerfulness.

This film will doubtless interest serious anime fans, but it won't win any converts.

This noisy, time-wasting spectacle is crammed with what purports to be characters, except that not one of them has any more depth than will fit into a one-line description.

The locations and production design are breathtakingly beautiful. But though cast largely with Chinese actors, it was shot in English, which no doubt made business sense but almost certainly accounts for many truly awful performances.

Pays backhanded homage to Woody Allen via the travails of college loser Max (Gary Lundy), who fears that years of wallowing in "Annie Hall" have permanently poisoned his love life.

Noisy, derivative and thoroughly preposterous even by the standards of 21st-century action movies.

Shot as "Backwater" and test-screened as "The Reaper," this film contains a couple of bracingly mean sequences, but it cleaves so closely to the slasher-movie formula that it can't muster up any suspense at all.

(Griffith's) appearance often verges on the grotesque. Which, come to think of it, could be said of the movie as well.

Tedious and obscure where it was apparently meant to be atmospheric and tantalizing.

Larry Bishop's painfully self-conscious homage to biker films of yesteryear is a carefully crafted pastiche that doesn't miss a wild-deadly-angels-devils-sadists-revenge cliché and can't hold a candle to the down-and-dirty likes of "The Glory Stompers."

An amazing technical accomplishment that never becomes a coherent movie.

Dopey "thriller."

The film pulls off a couple of "gotchas!", but the subtle creepiness of its predecessors is gone, replaced by a sense of numbing predictability.

The lesson is that money can buy a vanity project, but it can't buy talent, imagination or an audience.

Postal's touches of wit are lost in the flying body parts, gross-out gags, and the full frontal spectacle of Foley's no-longer-private parts.

A preposterous misfire.

Vulgar doesn't begin to describe it: Try one of the foulest, least funny films ever made under the rubric of black comedy.

The movie's film-studentish navel-gazing wears thin long before its over.

Utterly amateurish.

A crude, artless bogey tale.

Hard though this antic farce tries to be outrageous, its satirical jabs at American culture are obvious and juvenile, as is the use of Jimmy's plastic bubble as a goofy metaphor for fear of life.

Steve Austin is conspicuously inarticulate and uncharismatic. Former soccer lout Vinnie Jones, whom no one will ever mistake for Laurence Olivier, acts rings around him.

So awash in tired ethnic clichés that the story drowns.